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Updated Xbox360 tools

Over the weekend I dusted off my trusty Xbox360 and figured I should give it a little bit of use before its next gen replacement arrives. While I was setting it up and preparing it for use I thought it was about time I shared the current versions of my Xbox360 tools as well as a new one that is not feature complete, but at this stage may never be.

This tool does everything related to xex files. If you do any development or research of xex files, then you probably already have a version of this tool. The changes since the last public release include fixes to remove swapdisc routines from multidisc xexs, fix support for Kinect xex files and a special patching ability for certain xex files.

This adds the ability to load xex files into IDA directly without having to first process them in any way. It processes the xex file as much as possible while loading to minimise the work required by the user to get it to a state fit for reversing.

This is a previously unreleased command line tool that is not feature complete, but probably won’t ever be as it is likely I will move on from the Xbox360 before I get around to adding all the features I wanted to. Still it offers some nice simple features that are not available in other public tools. It should be pretty bugfree too, unlike the public pkg tools I tried before making this. I couldn’t be bothered to make a readme, but it is used in much the same way as XexTool. Run it without any parameters from the command line to print out its usage help text.

A feature that may be useful to developers is the ability to convert pkgs such as arcade games, DLC or installable game content from retail file format to devkit file format. This can be done by doing:

X360PkgTool -m0 somefile.pkg

I hope these continue to help the various research and development projects being done around the world on the Xbox360 system. Maybe I’ll get around to doing more posts soon, or perhaps it’ll be another year until I find time to do so again.

First to all thank you for this. I tried the xex loader on IDA v6.1 and I’m getting “processor module ppc did not accept the option string vmx128”. I’m guessing that’s because I’m not using IDA Pro v6.4. Can you think on any workaround?. thank you very much.

thank you very much, xorloser!
your tools are always powerful and helpful.
I am trying to develop a emulator for original xbox, and the one mads by MS on 360 works really great(backward compatibility). So my first thought was trying to reverse it. but for my to understand the ppc asm is already a pain, no to mention that to understand a emulator’s code on it.
you’re the only one I know who did a intensive reverse engineer work on the backward compatibility. Is there anyway you could possibly release some info about it either publicly or privately?